


(Interlude)

by nik_knows_nothing



Series: The Street Where You Live [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: (Still), Angst, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Not Canon Compliant, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Pre-Relationship, Tony Stark Is a Good Bro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-24
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-10-15 15:52:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17531705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nik_knows_nothing/pseuds/nik_knows_nothing
Summary: So of course, the by the time she actually works up the nerve to sayyep, alright, this is officially The Next Time—Of course, of course that’s when it all goeswrong.Like, really, really wrong.And the worst part is, she has absolutely no ideawhy.If she had to guess, though, she’d say it all started on the bus.





	(Interlude)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you again for reading this far!! Sorry this one took a little longer to upload, but it's a lot More than the other stories, and it kind of took me a while to get things worked out.
> 
> Thanks for reading and commenting, and you're all amazing and I wish I actually had time to respond to all the super sweet things you guys say!!
> 
> Special thanks to [the_most_beautiful_broom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_most_beautiful_broom) for continuing to proof-read and put up with last minute "wait what should I do" sessions

So of course, the by the time she actually works up the nerve to say _yep, alright, this is officially The Next Time—_

Of course, of course that’s when it all goes _wrong._

Like, really, really wrong.

And the worst part is, she has absolutely no idea _why._

If she had to guess, though, she’d say it all started on the bus.

They were on the bus, on the way back from another AcaDec victory, and MJ had been feeling very pleased with the team, pleased with life in general, had been sort of absently watching Parker and Leeds banter back and forth, a few rows up.

And then—something was different.

It was like the world blinked, and suddenly everything was the same, except Parker was staring around, eyes wide and face pale, and Leeds had stammered to a stop.

“Dude,” he’d said, after a moment. “You okay?”

MJ had ducked a little lower in her seat to avoid being caught eavesdropping, but she still heard the tremor in Parker’s voice when he answered.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

He’d missed school the next day.

And that wasn’t so very odd, not really, except when he’d come back, he’d been different.

Smaller, somehow, than before.

Quieter.

It’s like the moment before he fled the gym at homecoming, except worse, so much worse, because it doesn’t go away.

Spider-Man disappears.

Parker still shows up at school, and MJ watches him, during lunch and also not during lunch, watches as Leeds tries way too hard to cheer him up, babbling on and on about the latest Star Wars updates, and how cool it is that Diego Luna’s getting his own show, and whether The Mandalorian is going to be any good or if it’s just another cash grab—

Parker listens, nods.

He chimes in from time to time, but it feels hollow.

It feels wrong.

Because Parker isn’t nearly as dumb as he lets people think, most of the time, and MJ knows that, knows that a lot of his _gosh-gee-I’m-just-some-happy-go-lucky-average-studen_ t act is for show, is a way of throwing people off Spider-Man’s trail.

But before, it was like, no matter what, when she looked at him, she could still see glimpses of that stupid red and blue mask, like she could still see the vaguest outline of what made him an honest-to-goodness superhero.

Now, she looks at him, and she can barely even see Peter Parker.

Not really.

Not anymore.

It’s so, so wrong.

Because he may be ridiculously optimistic, in a way that’s exhausting to be around, but even when he’s not being all bubbly and cheerful, Peter Parker is always hopeful in a way that feels less like naiveté and more like determination.

Before she’d Known about the whole Spider-thing, it was the first thing about him that had caught MJ’s eye, like he’d somehow missed the memo the rest of them got somewhere around middle school that being hopeful, determined to see the best in everyone, was childish and silly.

He’d never gotten the memo, and so he’d forged ahead with his own take on things, no matter what.

Until now.

Now, MJ watches as Leeds tries to bait him into an argument over the prequel vs. sequel trilogies, and Parker doesn’t say a thing.

Neither does she.

Of course she doesn’t.

She’s still texting Liz.

On the bus, on the way home, Liz had congratulated her on the AcaDec win, and then demanded, _so have you told him??_

It was something like an inside joke, at that point.

But then things had changed, in a way MJ can’t quite put her finger on, and she hadn’t texted Liz back at all until much, much later, just one word—

_No_.

She and Liz still text.

But Liz doesn’t ask her, anymore.

When school ends, she takes her time putting her books away, wonders how long this has been going on, how much leeway she has to actually say something.

She wishes she’d told him before.

Now, it seems like saying _hey, so I know you’re Spider-Man_ would just make matters all the more complicated, mostly because she’s not really sure if he even wants to be, anymore.

She should have told him before.

She really should have.

MJ leans her shoulder against her locker door and thinks things through.

It’s been a couple weeks since The Bus, now.

Things don’t seem like they’re getting any better on their own.

And MJ’s not Parker—which is to say that she’s not as hopelessly optimistic as he is—she doesn’t think there’s any combination of words she can string together to make things magically better.

But Leeds has been carrying Parker more or less for the past three weeks.

At the very least, she can try and help him.

At the very least, she can give him a day off.

MJ chews on the inside of her cheek and then slams the door shut with enough force to rattle all the way down the locker wall.

Ned is standing out on the steps when she leaves, staring at his phone and looking very out of it.

“Leeds,” she says as she approaches. “Where’s Parker?”

“Uh—” Leeds glances at his phone, eyes wide and guilty, and then back at her. “How should I know?”

“Leeds,” MJ says. “Come on.”

He looks a little panicky, like he can’t figure out why MJ’s singled him out as the object of interrogation, and for a second, MJ thinks he’s going to splutter out some nonsense excuse, the way he did before The Bus, when Parker would bail in the middle of class and Leeds would have to come up with a reason as to why.

But then he squares his shoulders.

“I don’t know,” he says, words heavy with the stamp of truth. “I have no idea where he is.”

His hands are still fidgeting with his phone—waiting, MJ thinks, for a text back, a response, some sort of heads-up that _hey, man, it’s cool, I’m not dead in a freaking ditch_ , which seems like the very least Parker could do—

“I’ll find him,” she says. “You need to study for practice tomorrow.”

“MJ—”

“He’s my teammate, too.”

She doesn’t know what it is that convinces him, but Leeds only studies her for a few moments longer.

Then he nods, sends one last look at his phone screen for a text that doesn’t come, and heads off down the stairs.

MJ watches him go.

Then she turns, too, and thinks, _okay, so if I were definitely-not-Spider-Man, where would I go?_

Unbidden, the memory of the flight from before, nearly a month ago, now, pops into her head.

MJ looks up.

_Higher_ , she thinks. _Somewhere high above it all._

It still takes her hours to find him.

And in the end, it really comes down to luck.

Someone on Twitter posts a grainy snapshot of that familiar red and blue suit, sitting on top of a seedy-looking apartment building somewhere, just barely visible with how zoomed-in the picture is.

The first comment says _OMG IS SPIDEY BACK???_

The reply immediately below it says, _don’t be a dick._

_Spider-Man’s been gone for weeks._

And the comment below says, _you think maybe this is the new guy?_

_You think maybe the first one’s—_

MJ doesn’t read the rest of the comment.

By the time she gets there, the rooftop is empty.

But she doesn’t think he’d have gone that far, so she hikes up her backpack on her shoulders and begins to walk again.

Thirty minutes later, she’s this close to giving up—except she did promise Leeds, she told him she’d find the guy—and then she looks up again, and there he is.

Just like that, like where else would he ever be?

She looks up, and he’s there.

For a long time, MJ stands there, clutching her backpack and feeling very small as she looks up at the little figure, blue and red, so very high above her.

_Screw it,_ she thinks, and groans out loud.

Then she buzzes all the apartments in the building until someone on the second floor comes and lets her in, which gets her access to the stairwell, at least.

“Here to drop off a school thing,” she tells the college-age-looking-girl who looks way too tired to even focus on MJ, let alone care why she’s there.

So then she’s inside the building, and she ends up having to walk up, like, a billion flights of stairs until she’s all gross and sweaty and out of breath, and knocks on the first door on the left.

“Hey,” she says, when the suspicious-looking old lady answers the door wide enough to peer out.

“Hello,” says the suspicious-looking old lady, in an appropriately suspicious tone of voice.

“Spider-Man’s dissociating on your roof,” MJ says. “And I’m getting kind of worried. Is it okay if I use your fire escape?”

The lady still doesn’t open the door all the way.

“And who are you?” she says.

“Hell if I know,” MJ says. “But I’m worried about him.”

The old lady considers this.

“Think he’ll listen to you?” she asks at last.

_Hell if I know,_ MJ nearly says again.

Instead, she says, “He might”, and it seems to be enough.

By the time she carefully edges her way out onto the fire escape, she’s holding a plate of fresh-baked cookies from the freezer section and trying very hard not to look down.

Spider-Man is sitting with his legs dangling off the edge of the roof, and his mask is pulled up so that she can see his chin, his mouth, the bottom of his nose.

MJ knocks on the spindly ladder that leads to the roof, and he jumps, startled, and pulls the mask all the way down in the space between two breaths.

She could tell him not to bother.

She could tell him she already knows what he looks like without it.

Instead, she clambers up the ladder, settles a safe distance away, and sets the plate of cookies on the ledge between them.

Parker glances at her, and then looks away again, staring at the city streets that spread out beneath them.

It’s quite a view.

And MJ wasn’t lying, the first time she met Spider-Man, not really—she’s not actually acrophobic, but she doesn’t necessarily _love_ heights, especially not for a very long time—

But she can do this.

For just a little while, she can do this.

The cookies have gone cold by the time she takes one off the plate and breaks it in half.

“No one’s seen you around for a while.”

She’s sort of aiming for casual, but it’s the first time she’s spoken since she climbed up onto the roof, so she thinks maybe it misses the mark by a little bit.

Parker shrugs.

“I’ve been here,” he says.

MJ looks at his suit and thinks about the comments under the Twitter post that led her here, the ones that she definitely didn’t finish reading.

“No,” she says. “You haven’t.”

“Not like this,” Parker allows. “But I’ve—I’ve been around.”

Like at school.

School, where he walks through the halls without looking at anyone, keeps his eyes glued firmly to the ground and shrinks away almost—almost—imperceptibly if anyone gets too close.

Even her.

Even Leeds.

“Well,” MJ says. “No one’s seen you.”

She takes another cookie, looks at it for a second, and then puts it back on the plate.

“You okay?”

What a useless question.

What an absolutely useless question to try and sum up whatever’s gone wrong that she still doesn’t really understand.

But it comes out in a casual, offhand sort of way, and so she’s not really surprised when Parker shrugs again.

“Sure,” he says, and even if she didn’t know he was Peter Parker, she’d still know it was a lie. “I’m fine.”

“Really,” MJ says.

It’s not a question.

“I’m fine,” he says again.

She doesn’t push him.

Instead, she takes another cookie, the same one she’d put down before, and nudges the plate a little closer to him.

“The lady in the apartment,” she says, and drums her heel against the wall for emphasis. “She wanted me to give these to you.”

“Oh.” Parker looks down, as though he’s only just now noticing the plate, and then he can’t seem to look away again. “Cool.”

“She baked them for you,” MJ says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. “I was there. I watched.”

“Cool,” he says again, still staring hard at the plate.

Then he shakes his head, like he’s clearing away whatever thoughts were rattling around in there before.

“I mean, thanks—thank you,” he says. “I can go and thank her—”

“Later,” MJ says, before he can bail right then and there. “There’s no rush.”

He settles back slightly.

She watches him out of the corner of her eye, and nudges the plate another inch, so that it bumps up against his leg.

“You should try one,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says, but makes no move to do so. “Yeah, I will.”

MJ waits.

Finally, he sighs and takes a cookie off the plate, but he doesn’t eat it.

Instead, he just breaks it in half, and then in half again, and again and again until he’s holding a handful of crumbs like confetti.

Like dust.

MJ watches as he turns his hand over, and the wind that slides up over the building catches the crumbs and carries them away in a second.

“So,” she says, as he wipes his hand on the legs of his suit.

“So,” he echoes.

Then he frowns, eyes going small beneath the mask.

“How did you even get up here?” he asks, which is, like, seven different types of disturbing, because he was literally sitting right there when she climbed up the ladder.

“Climbed,” she says, and tells herself very firmly to stay where she is.

Parker gapes at her.

“MJ, that’s not safe!” he says, voice louder than it was a second before. “You could’ve—you could’ve been hurt—”

It’s the loudest he’s been in weeks.

MJ doesn’t miss the last-second word swap.

“But I didn’t,” she says, slow and careful and still dying to know what’s happened, what’s changed, what’s gone wrong. “And now I’m here. So it’s okay.”

Parker seems to realize he’s overreacting, settles back again, so that MJ realizes she doesn’t know when he shifted forwards in the first place.

“Right,” he says, and gives a little huff of air that could be a laugh if it weren’t so hollow-sounding. “It’s okay.”

MJ settles back, too.

It feels polite.

“So,” she says, as he picks away at a few crumbs that the wind left behind. “You want to tell me what happened?”

Parker gives another shallow not-laugh.

“No,” he says. “Not really.”

MJ could really grow to hate that sound.

Parker laughs at the dumbest things, usually, one of Ned’s jokes, or Mr. Harrington's lame science puns, or Abraham’s repeated use of the buzzer as a _Flash-is-wrong_ button.

This doesn’t sound like that.

This sounds like pretty much the opposite of that.

“Okay,” she says.

Again, she chews on the inside of her cheek, debating, and then decides she may as well go for it, as long as she’s here.

“Will you tell me, anyways?”

Parker grows very still.

MJ doesn’t dare look at him head on, but she can see him looking at her, still out of the corner of her eyes, and wonders what he would do if she did turn to face him.

She stays where she is and looks out at the city.

“Are you asking me to?” Parker says at last.

MJ almost says _yes_ , but something about his voice makes her pause, reconsider.

“I’m not telling you to,” she says, and she thinks he knows that, but it can’t hurt, just to be clear. “You can always say _no_.”

That gets her one more tired, empty laugh.

“No.”

“No?” she echoes, and wonders if he means _no_ , he doesn’t want to tell her.

“No,” he says again, by way of clarification. “I can’t.”

_You can always say no._

“You can’t.”

It doesn’t come out like a question, either, but she means it to, because this is Spider-Man, he’s already impossible, he can do literally anything, everything—

“I can’t,” Parker says.

MJ doesn’t ask again.

She could.

But she doesn’t.

And in the end, that seems to be what makes up his mind, because he sighs, sits forward and rests his arms over his knees, leaning far out over the empty air.

“So a couple weeks ago,” he says, slow and halting. “I was—on the bridge. On the way home from—from work.”

So she was right.

It did start on the bus.

Any other day, and MJ would roll her eyes, because, really, who does he think he’s kidding with the _on the way home from work_ bit?

“Okay,” she says instead, and hopes he doesn’t notice.

“And then there was this _thing_ ,” Parker continues, and waves one hand at the empty sky above them, where the sun’s beginning to hang low over the buildings. “This thing in the sky.”

MJ frowns.

She’s pretty sure she would have remembered that.

She is, after all, very observant.

“Thing?” she asks.

“An alien spaceship,” he clarifies. “Invaders. Here for—something. I never really found out what it was. Not really.”

He adds the last bit in a wry sort of tone, like _isn’t it funny_ , that that all happened, and in the end, he never really knew why?

MJ’s still a little hung up on the whole _there was an alien spaceship and no one else saw it_.

She thinks about the moment when the world seemed to blink, like the whole universe had somehow skipped a step, and then everything was rolling on, unnoticed.

A horrible suspicion begins to form in the back of her mind.

“And Iron Man needed my help,” Parker says, and MJ forces her thoughts back to here and now, on the edge of the roof. “And so did—the rest of them. All of the Avengers. The whole team.”

MJ thinks about P. E., about Coach’s easy dismissal of the figure in their fitness challenge videos.

“All of them?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says, and then, because apparently this is the most unbelievable part of his story so far, he adds, “Believe it or not.”

“I believe you,” MJ says.

That’s the most unbelievable bit of all, the fact that she actually does.

Because, again, Parker’s not as dumb as he looks, and she knows he knows better than to try and spin a story like this without taking it somewhere even remotely plausible.

Which means it must have happened.

She believes him.

“Well,” he says, like he wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t. “Keep listening.”

MJ crosses her arms. “I am.”

For a second, Parker looks like he’s going to argue, like he’s waiting for her to tell him that he’s insane, that this is all nonsense, that it didn’t happen.

She raises and eyebrow, and he nods.

“And so I helped them,” he says. “I was there, and I helped them.”

There’s a sudden desperation in his voice, and MJ shrinks back a little before she even realizes what she’s doing, because he sounds so desperate to believe this, that he helped, that whatever happened, he was there to help.

“And you stopped the aliens,” she says quickly, because surely they would have heard about it if he hadn’t. “So—so, it’s okay, right?”

That last part comes out a little smaller than she meant it to.

She didn’t mean for it to sound so uncertain.

“Sure,” Parker says, and forces his voice into a happy, cheerful register. “Everything’s okay now.”

MJ’s not buying it for a second.

“Except?” she prompts.

Parker takes another cookie, crushes it easily between his thumb and forefinger, and she watches the crumbs scatter on the wind once more.

“Except,” he says, in a tone that’s so very, very far away. “Except I died.”

For a second, MJ doesn’t think she’s heard him correctly.

Then her brain catches up to her all at once, and she has to ground herself with a hand on the ledge, so that she doesn’t go tumbling off the roof.

“ _What?”_

“I died.”

He’s been doing his best to sound casual, unaffected, but now he shakes his head, turns to face her, and the eyes on his suit are way too large.

“MJ, I _died_ ,” he says, sounding like he’s half his age, like a little kid, like he’s right there in the moment, all over again. “I was with Mr. Stark, and I knew it was about to happen—”

“You knew?” MJ asks, because this is so much worse than if it had caught him off guard.

“I knew,” he says.

The wind that still dances over the rooftop is cold, and that must be why MJ shivers suddenly, why Parker’s hands, braced on either side of him, are not completely still.

“Jesus,” she says, and it doesn’t even come close to being enough.

“I have—this thing,” Parker says, and nods to indicate his suit in general. “If I’m in danger. Heightened senses, Mr. Stark says. To—warn me. I think.”

“God, what is that even like?” MJ blurts, momentarily distracted by this new piece of information, the way it lines up to the way he always seems to be able to move a second sooner, a second quicker, even than the other heroes.

“It can be—a lot,” Parker allows.

All at once, MJ remembers the time after Ben Parker’s death, the way Peter had jumped at random noises, sat in a couple classes with the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and earphones in his ears at all times.

Suddenly, it doesn’t sound quite so cool.

“Okay,” she says, and wonders what it felt like, in the moments before the end.

“But the thing is—before—” Parker breaks off suddenly, draws half a ragged breath, and then tries again. “Just before it happened, I could feel this—this fear. I’ve never been so scared in all my life, and it was just—there. And there was nothing I could do.”

Heightened senses.

To warn him.

What a joke.

“And then?” MJ asks, as quiet and careful as she knows how to be.

“And then,” Parker says. “And then it was over, and everything was done.”

“Were you—” A thousand questions blur through her mind, and she forces them into order, rejects most of them immediately. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I was—somewhere else.”

_Somewhere else_.

“Somewhere else,” MJ echoes, and mentally braces herself to have to rethink a whole bunch of theological issues. “Like—what, like heaven or something?”

“No,” Parker says, and the tone in his voice sounds like she’s said something funny, or at least ironic, and she doesn’t know what it was. “No, I don’t think it was heaven.”

“What was it?”

He hesitates.

Then he picks up the entire plate of cookies, balances it on the end of one finger, and holds it at arm’s length, out over the streets below.

The wind rattles all the cookies still on the plate, and the plate itself wobbles dangerously—a particularly strong gust of wind makes MJ catch her breath, and the plate almost falls—

It doesn’t.

Parker looks at it for a second longer, and then pulls his hand back, places the plate silently back down on the ground between them.

“Like that,” he says, and MJ thinks about the way the plate had shook, the way her breath had jumped up to the back of her throat. “Forever.”

Waiting, then.

Or maybe just about to fall.

“Maybe the others had the same thing,” Parker says, and MJ remembers what he’d said, that the whole team was there. “I don’t know. Where I was, it was only me.”

Where he was?

_Right,_ MJ thinks. _Aliens_.

And it’s not fair, because any other time, she would be absolutely bombarding him with questions, because she’s suddenly about 99.97% sure that Parker’s been to an actual alien planet, and what must that have been like?

But then Parker, so quietly she doesn’t think she was supposed to hear, says, “Just me”, and MJ realizes what he means, thinks about standing on the edge of a roof, waiting to fall, in a place you’ve never been before, and where there’s no one else around.

She doesn’t like this story.

She doesn’t like this story at all.

But it can’t end there, of course it can’t, because he’s here now, and he may not be the same way he was before, but he’s very much alive, so there has to be more to it.

“And then?” she prompts, and Parker shakes his head, snapping himself back to the present, away from wherever he was hiding away inside his thoughts.

“And then Mr. Stark was there,” he says. “And some of the others.”

MJ frowns. “What do you mean, they were there?”

“I don’t know,” Parker says, and then catches the look on her face and shakes his head again. “MJ, I don’t _know_. But they were there, and they—they turned things back. Turned back time.”

_What_.

It’s ridiculous, of course, absolutely unbelievable—except that just a few years ago, pretty much everything the Avengers do on a daily basis was unbelievable, was impossible—

And now it’s ordinary.

“Is that a thing people can do now?” she can’t help asking, though, because magic glowy hands and metal flying suits are one thing, but time control is a whole new level of WTF-ness.

“I guess,” Parker says, and for just a second, he sounds like himself, the same exasperation as when they were covering a new topic in class, and he was annoyed that it didn’t 100% make sense yet. “I guess maybe it always was.”

MJ thinks about that.

Parker hesitates, like he wants to say more about it, but then he seems to remember how his story was going, and that note in his voice that almost sounded like him is gone again.

“So I was dead,” he says. “And then I wasn’t, and I was back on the bus, and none of it ever happened.”

If he notices his slip-up with the bus, he doesn’t let on.

MJ lets it slide, too.

None of it ever happened.

That moment when everything skipped a breath.

The moment when the timeline started over.

It’s too much.

It’s entirely unbelievable.

She believes him.

“And no one knew,” she says, and remembers the way Parker had stared around, the moment after the reset, eyes wide and scattered all to pieces.

“And no one knew,” he agrees.

They sit side by side as the sun sinks lower and lower, until it slots neatly between the buildings and turns the long streets red and gold with its glare.

MJ kicks her heels against the wall, and then remembers suspicious little Mrs. Ortega in the apartment below, and stops.

“And now I’m back,” Parker says suddenly. “And I’m trying to go about things, the way I did before, but—I was dead, and I thought that was the way I had always been, I had always been dead—until I was alive, and then I had always been alive, and—”

He breaks off in the middle of his sentence, and MJ’s holding onto the edge of the roof with both hands, trying not to shudder again at the thought of how that must feel, what that must feel like every second of every day.

And then, in a quiet, way-too-quiet voice, Parker adds the worst bit of all.

“I remember it both ways,” he says, and MJ stares.

“Both ways,” she echoes. “Dead and alive?”

_That was the way I had always been._

_I had always been dead—and then I had always been alive—_

_I remember it both ways._

“Both ways,” he says, and then taps the side of his head with a finger that shakes just a little, if she looks very close. “They’re here, right here, constantly, and—I’m so, so scared, because what if I wake up tomorrow, and it’s just—I’m just—”

_That was the way I had always been_.

MJ feels like she’s going to be sick.

“And everything’s the way it was,” she guesses, and for a second, allows herself to imagine that, waking up on the edge of falling, and no one else around. “The first time.”

Parker doesn’t nod.

But he doesn’t shake his head, either, just presses his hands flat against the roof, forces them to lie still and stop shaking.

“I remember it,” he nearly whispers.

MJ wants to cry.

She wants to cry, and she also kind of wants to scream, and she’s also still not completely certain that she’s not going to throw up, or do some combination of all three.

_I still remember._

“Does anyone else?” she asks, and he does shake his head now.

“I don’t know,” he admits.

He presses his hands even harder into the roof, but they’re still shaking, still unsteady, and for one incredibly foolish moment, MJ thinks about reaching out and covering his hand with her own.

She doesn’t.

She’s not that brave.

Instead, she just places her hands at her side, the same way he’s done, so that the edge of her hand brushes against his, just near enough that he can pull away, if he wants to.

Parker’s head turns to look at the space between them, and he doesn’t move his hand, but he doesn’t look away either, and MJ feels her face begin to heat up.

“Is this okay?” she asks.

When he still doesn’t answer, she reconsiders, starts to pull her hand away.

“Sorry, I can—”

“No,” Parker blurts, and she’s not quite sure how he manages it, but he moves somehow, so that his smallest finger is looped over her own.

_Pinky promise_ , MJ thinks.

“No, it’s okay,” Parker says, quieter than before. “You can—I don’t—it’s okay.”

MJ watches him.

“Okay,” she says at last.

He turns away first, and the glare from off the buildings is so bright, so blindingly bright that it nearly hurts to look at, but she looks at the way it glints off all the windows, thinks about how it would look in pen and ink, and doesn’t say a word.

They sit like that for a while, and MJ thinks about what she’s learned.

God, no wonder he hasn’t been bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at school.

She wonders if he’s told Ned.

“You have to tell Mr. Stark,” she says at last, only because asking him if Leeds knows would be impossible.

Parker glances over at her, hesitates like he’s going to say something, and then looks away again.

“P—” She almost calls him _Peter_. “Come on, Spider-Man. You have to tell Mr. Stark.”

She’s not Stark’s biggest fan.

But at the very least, he’s been open about his struggles with PTSD, and if there’s anyone who could help him—if there’s anyone she knows Parker would trust to let help him, it’d be Iron Man himself.

If he can help, she’ll never say another word against him.

“I can’t tell him,” Parker says.

“Why not?”

“I begged him to let me come.”

“So?”

“MJ, I _begged_ him to let me come,” Parker says, and he doesn’t snap, but his voice isn’t exactly stable, either. “I wanted to help. I thought—I thought I could make a difference.”

He breaks off, takes a quick breath, and she doesn’t understand, she doesn’t get why that would be enough to keep him silent—

“And instead I made him watch,” he says. “I died right in front of him, and he had to watch, and then—”

MJ waits, but he doesn’t seem like he wants to continue.

“And then?”

Parker just shakes his head again, too quick and too jerky, the movement stilted and uneven.

Something like a lightbulb goes off in the back of her head.

“Was he—” MJ pauses, takes a moment to choose her question carefully. “You said that there were others—”

He knows what she’s trying to ask.

Because of course he does.

“He didn’t die,” he says, and MJ waits for the other shoe to drop.

“So?” she prompts, when he still hesitates.

“ _But_ ,” he says, and his hand shifts beneath hers, like he’s about to move away. “But Ms. Potts did.”

For a second, MJ doesn’t understand.

Then she does, and a sudden wave of nausea leaves her feeling suddenly, impossibly cold.

“Pepper Potts,” she says, stunned. “This happened—what, this happened here? On Earth?”

Parker looks to where their hands are still tangled together.

“It happened everywhere,” he says, in the general direction of the pavement.

“You mean—”

“I mean _everywhere_. Half of everybody,” he says, hollow and faraway. “Half of everything.”

MJ tries to square that up in her mind.

He was on an alien planet when it happened.

He couldn’t have seen, surely he couldn’t have seen all the way back to Earth—

“How do you know?”

“I told you. I remember it both ways.”

It’s like some fairytale curse, MJ thinks, or some Greek tragedy, like you get to live again, but you pay the price, and the price is holding it all in your head, every moment for the rest of your life, and always _wondering—_

“And I told you,” Parker adds. “I have this—thing. This warning. When one of the others gets too close, it’s like I’m remembering.”

In a flash, MJ’s back at school, and she’s seeing again the way that he shies away, whenever someone brushes past him in the hall, and it’s like another moment where the world blinks sideways, where everything makes sense, and she wishes so badly that it didn’t.

“What does it feel like?”

The question tears its way out of her throat before she can stop it, and then she wishes she could turn back time—because apparently that’s a thing that can happen now—stop herself from even thinking about asking.

Parker hesitates.

Then he turns sideways, so that one leg is bent in front of him, and he reaches over, holds his hand half an inch away from her arm—not touching, just hanging in the air, close enough that she can almost feel the warmth of the suit—

She doesn’t know what to do, so she sits very still and watches as Parker holds his hand just a hair’s breadth away from where she’s pushed up the sleeve of her jacket, where she’s still got the address for the brand-new bookstore scrawled in blue ink on her skin—

The wind has died down, just for a second.

But then Parker shudders, like he’s just been dumped in ice water, and pulls his hand back, rubbing it quickly against his own arm, like when you’re cold and trying to get rid of goosebumps—

“Like that,” he says, and it doesn’t really answer her question, but he sounds so shattered that she doesn’t dare ask him again. “It feels like that.”

_Oh,_ MJ thinks.

_Oh_.

She tries to speak, but it doesn’t come out right, so she closes her mouth, clears her throat, tries again, and still only manages to speak in the smallest voice ever.

“I died?”

“You died.”

She tries to make sense of this.

They’ve turned back time, of course she wouldn’t remember, but still— _still_ —

“I don’t remember,” she says, anyways.

Parker nods. “No one does.”

Except—

“Except you.”

“Except me.”

MJ waits for him to let go, then, pull his hand away from hers, because she’s seen the way he acts, when people get too close in the hallway, and it makes sense now, if he’s constantly fighting back the urge to shiver and shake, if brushing past someone who’s not-dead triggers every fight-or-flight instinct that he’s ever had.

He doesn’t move his hand.

“I walk down the street,” he says, quiet and despairing. “And it’s like—constantly, constantly, it’s like I’m surrounded—”

He doesn’t finish the sentence.

That’s okay.

She thinks she’s got a pretty good idea what he was going to say, anyway.

“Like you’re surrounded by ghosts,” she guesses.

“Yeah,” he says. “Something like that.”

For a second, MJ just sits there, and she wants to move, wants to kick her feet against the wall beneath them, wants to grab her bags and head for home, pretend she never heard any of this, forget it ever happened.

But Parker is still sitting, motionless, still turned sideways but staring out at the city, and he’s been doing this for weeks now, dealing with this for weeks, and never saying a thing.

Suddenly, without even knowing why, MJ’s angry.

“No,” she says, and something about her voice is enough to startle him out of his thoughts, so that he glances over at her once more. “No, that’s enough.”

Parker blinks. “What?”

“You don’t—you don’t get to martyr yourself over this,” MJ says, and she thinks she’s probably being too loud, but she doesn’t care. “You don’t get to make the rest of us into your own personal ghost story, do you hear me?”

“MJ—”

Before she can think better of it, MJ grabs his hand and places it just below her own chin.

“Look,” she snaps, and tilts her head up a little, so that he can feel her pulse, where it jumps out against the skin. “Look, I’m here. I’m alive. Do you feel that?”

Parker’s hand flinches, like he wants to pull away, but she still feels his fingers brush against her pulse, like even in spite of himself, he has to check, has to prove to himself that she’s still there, that her heart’s still beating.

For a second, he doesn’t speak, and MJ doesn’t, either, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because she thinks if she tries to say anything, she’ll remember all at once how really kind of extra she’s being right now, and she’s choosing to save that self-examination for another day.

Then Peter says, “You were dead.”

His voice is so small.

She hates it.

Hates the creatures she never saw, that forced their whole universe into this farce of a second chance, hates that Parker’s been carrying this around for weeks and never told a soul, hates the fact that he still hasn’t moved his hand, like he still can’t quite believe it all.

“And now I’m not,” MJ says. “You know why?”

He doesn’t answer, just shakes his head.

“Because you were there,” she tells him.

“I didn’t—”

“I don’t know what happened,” she admits.

For all she knows, he really _didn’t_ do a thing, and it really was Iron Man and these mysterious _Others_ who saved the day.

“But I know you were there,” she says. “And you tried to stop it, and now we’re not dead. Neither of us. We’re both—alive.”

Parker starts to say something, changes his mind, and then tries again.

“What if that’s not enough?” he asks, and if it weren’t for how close they’re sitting, she thinks she wouldn’t have heard him.

_We’re alive,_ she thinks, but out loud, she says only, “That’s all there ever is.”

For a long moment, they’re frozen exactly where they are, and MJ can’t tell if he’s even breathing or not, completely still and just a little space between them.

Then Parker sighs, drops his head forward to land on her shoulder, and his hand moves to curl around the back of her neck.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

MJ’s not really a hug person, but it’s not like she’s going to push him away in the middle of a full-scale meltdown, so she carefully wraps her arms around his shoulders and tries to ignore how awkward it feels.

She doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for.

For freaking out, maybe?

For telling her all of this?

_For letting anyone die in the first place_.

It’s ridiculous.

It’s utterly ridiculous, and she wants to snap at him that it’s not his fault, except that it’s still too quiet, up on top of the building, and so she just nods, careful not to jostle him.

“Me too,” she says at last.

Parker takes a shaky sort of breath, and MJ’s not sure, but she thinks he might be crying, just a little.

Which, like, is definitely very valid.

Her own throat feels suspiciously tight, and she’s blinking a little more than she usually does.

But crying in the suit has got to be a real pain, with the mask and all.

She thinks about her options for a few moments longer.

Then she says, “Here”, and tucks her chin onto his shoulder, closing her eyes too tight.

“What?”

“I’m closing my eyes,” she tells him.

_“What?”_

“If you want to take the mask off,” MJ says, in her best _isn’t it obvious_ tone. “I won’t look.”

For a moment, she doesn’t think he’ll do it.

She keeps her eyes shut anyways, and at last Parker shifts a little bit, takes another breath.

“Promise?” he asks, and she would roll her eyes, except, again, she’s keeping those very much shut.

“Promise.”

He lets go just long enough to tug the mask up, and then they’re just sitting there, an awkward tangle of arms and legs, and MJ wonders what exactly she’s supposed to say to make things better.

This isn’t her job, fixing people like this, and she doesn’t even know how she’s supposed to guess where to begin.

So, in the end, she doesn’t say anything.

She hopes it’s enough.

How long they sit there, she’s not quite sure, but finally Parker shifts, and she keeps her eyes closed, but moves her arms a little, so that if he wants to pull away, he can.

He doesn’t.

Not quite yet.

“Thanks,” he says, and it’s weird to hear someone’s voice like this, because she can picture Parker’s face so easily, just a few inches away, where she can feel his hair brushing against the bones in her cheek.

“You’re welcome,” she says, and doesn’t think about it any closer.

They sit that way for a few moments longer.

Then Parker says, “Keep your eyes closed.”

She nods, and he eases away, so that she can still feel him sitting too close, but the wind must have picked up sometime when she wasn’t paying attention, and the space between them feels suddenly cold.

“You okay?” she asks, head turned in his general direction.

“I’m okay,” he says. MJ’s not convinced.

“Really okay, or sitting-on-the-edge-of-a-building-and-dissociating okay?”

He laughs, and it doesn’t sound like it should, like the way Peter Parker usually laughs, but at least it doesn’t sound like that hollow nothing from before.

“Neither,” he says.

_What if that’s not enough?_

_That’s all there is._

“Well,” MJ says. “That’s something.”

“It’s something,” he agrees.

She wishes he would put the mask back on.

It feels stupid, just sitting there with her eyes closed, with only the faintest spots of red behind her eyelids when she turns her head in the general direction of the setting sun.

MJ feels the heat from the sun cutting through the chill of the wind, and she wonders if Parker’s doing the same.

Then she thinks, _right, I really need to be going home soon_.

“Do you have Mr. Stark’s phone number?” she asks.

“What?”

It’s so very Peter Parker.

She can practically see the baffled look on his face, and almost smiles before she can stop herself.

Then she digs around in her pockets, rolls her thumb across the screen to unlock the phone, and holds it out to where she thinks he’s still sitting.

“Dial it,” she orders.

“Wait, what?”

It’s like he’s forgotten how to say anything else.

“Dial it.”

For a second, she’s still holding her phone out, but then he takes it, and she tries to remember if there’s anything incriminating on her phone that he could find in the ten seconds she’s giving him to dial—

He hands the phone back.

“It’s ringing,” he says.

MJ nods, presses the phone to her ear.

The tone rings once, twice—

Then there’s a _click_ , and the voice she’s heard coming off the television since she was a kid says—

“Okay, listen, I don’t know who you are or how you got this number, but you’ve got thirty seconds to convince me not to hang up—”

“Bet I can do it in ten,” MJ says, before he can use up her thirty seconds all by himself. “I’m with Spider-Man, and he needs your help.”

The other end of the phone goes silent.

“Well?” she prompts, and can’t help feeling just a little bit smug. “That _convincing_ enough?”

“Where are you?”

Tony Stark’s voice is more serious than she’s ever heard, but then again, she’s only ever heard him in various press conferences and stuff, so that’s not really saying all that much.

“Where are we?” she asks Parker, and when he doesn’t reply, the urge to open her eyes just so she can roll them at him is almost overwhelming. “Did you just shrug?”

“Uh,” he says, so she knows he definitely did.

“Here,” she says, and holds the phone out towards him once more. “Talk to him so he doesn’t think you’re being kidnapped.”

Parker fumbles the phone, and if he drops it from who-knows-how-high-up, she will kill him—

MJ flinches away from the thought before it’s fully formed.

It’s not quite so funny, anymore.

“Mr. Stark,” he says, voice jumping up another octave or so, just for fun. “I—no. No, I’m okay.”

MJ does her best to give him an unimpressed look, which is sort of difficult without full use of her entire face.

“No,” he says again. “No, it’s just MJ. Um. Yeah.”

She very, very badly wants to open her eyes.

She should have made him put it on speaker.

“I’m—I’m okay,” Parker says, quickly, like he’s trying to move the conversation along. “Are you—oh.”

He falls silent for a second, and if MJ listens very hard, she can hear Tony Stark’s voice, tinny and recorded-sounding through her phone.

“Alright,” he says at last. “Bye.”

And then he must hang up, because when he speaks again, he’s not using his phone voice anymore.

“He’s on his way,” he says, and MJ holds her hand out for her phone.

“Yeah,” she says, and locks the screen again. “Caught that.”

She slips her phone back in her pocket, and then feels around the ground around them, moving mostly on a hunch, until she finds a bundle of fabric that feels too expensive to be a rag.

The mask.

“Here,” she says, and tosses it in the direction of his voice. “Put this back on.”

Because, really, this is getting kind of ridiculous.

“What?”

“I’m not meeting Tony Stark with my eyes closed,” MJ says. “I’m just not. That’s too weird, even for me.”

Parker laughs politely, even though they both know full well that she doesn’t actually have that much of a threshold for how weird is too weird.

After all, she’s here, isn’t she?

So Parker laughs, and she waits for him to give her the _all-clear_ , but it doesn’t come, and she’s stuck still standing there, her eyes screwed shut and her face turned towards the sun.

“Or,” Parker says at last. “Or you could just open your eyes.”

MJ pauses.

For one second, she almost does.

Because it would be easy.

The easiest thing in the world—just open her eyes, turn her head, and then act surprised when she sees that it’s Peter Parker sitting next to her.

She must hesitate a moment too long, because she can hear Parker sort of shuffling next to her.

“You know,” he says, way too quick and mumbly to be casual. “If you wanted.”

She wants to.

She really, really wants to.

But then she thinks back over their conversation today, about the way he’d been actually, literally crying just a little while before, about the way he shivers whenever someone gets too close.

She can’t do it.

Not today.

Not yet.

Because she’s planning on telling him—really, she is, despite what Liz used to joke—and she doesn’t know what he’s thinking—of course she doesn’t, how could she?

But there’s a chance he’s just offering because—because he’s Peter Parker, and he’s so stupidly optimistic and sunshiney, and there’s probably some part of his superhero brain that says, _right, you owe her one, so this is what you do._

She doesn’t like those terms very much.

Not at all.

“Come on,” MJ says, because it’s not fair, that he’s offering something she’s been trying to work up the nerve to ask about for weeks, and here she is, and she’s saying _no._

It’s so very unfair.

“You don’t have to,” Parker says. “If you don’t want to.”

And MJ almost laughs, because it’s practically the same thing she told him—there’s always a choice—and her answer is going to be pretty much the same.

“I’d like to,” she says instead, because she doesn’t want him to take it as a bad thing.

“But you’re not going to.”

He sounds—resigned.

Resigned, but not upset, and not really surprised, either.

This is a strange thing to consider, because MJ considers herself sort of an expert in Peter Parker, in a non-stalker way, and it’s a very, very odd thing to think about, that he might know her just as well.

“No,” she says, and smiles to make it a little nicer. “No, I don’t think so. Not today.”

Parker’s silent for a little longer.

But then he says, “You can look”, and his voice has that usual, slightly-muffled quality that it always takes when he’s wearing the mask.

She opens her eyes.

Parker’s still sitting where he was when she closed her eyes, still with one leg crossed sideways in front of him, and when she looks at him, he lifts up his shoulders in a sort of _now what?_

MJ smiles again, and it doesn’t feel quite as cheerful as she always thought it would, in this sort of situation, but it feels real, and that’s good enough for her.

“Go get some help, Spider-Man,” she says, and it’s quiet enough, so high above the city, that she doesn’t have to raise her voice. “Talk to the people you need. Talk to the people who need you.”

And here they’re dancing dangerously close to the same topic, because she knows exactly who she’s talking about—May Parker and Ned Leeds and the whole school, it seems like, because she’s not the only one who’s noticed the wrongness.

She doesn’t name names.

She thinks he understands, anyways.

“Get better,” she says, and then jerks her chin in a nod. “Then you can come back here and ask me again.”

Parker nods, too, and then looks suddenly back over the rooftops at something she can’t hear.

_Heightened senses_ , MJ thinks. _Right_.

He hops to his feet, holds out a hand to help her up, and then he’s got his head tipped to one side, and he’s just looking at her.

“What do you think you’ll say?” he asks.

It takes her a second to place the question in the context of their conversation, because her mind’s still moving in parallel about a thousand miles away.

Then she realizes, and she almost— _almost_ —laughs out loud.

“Why don’t you find out for yourself?” she asks, and the next second, the roar of repulsor cannons fills the sudden silence, and then Iron Man is there.

Just, y’know.

Actual Iron Man.

On the roof.

In Queens.

Parker drops her hand and steps away, so that MJ realizes she hadn’t thought about how this was going to look, and she can feel the judgment rolling off Stark in waves.

“Mr. Stark,” Parker starts. “I—”

“Are you alright?”

It’s the first thing Stark says, and MJ forgives him for that, just a little.

The suit opens, pulling back from his face, because it’s not like Tony Stark has ever cared about keeping his identity secret, and then she can see him scanning Parker even without the suit’s help, checking to make sure the kid’s okay.

“I’m fine,” Parker says, and MJ snorts.

“Uh _huh_ ,” says Stark, who sounds about as convinced as MJ feels. “Your…maternal figure is on the phone. I’m patching her through to Karen. Go talk to her.”

_Nice save,_ MJ thinks. _Very subtle_.

Maternal figure.

Really.

But Parker nods, and then, when Stark waves for him to go be somewhere else, he heads off for the other corner of the roof, and MJ listens as he starts talking to Mrs. Parker, assuring her he’s alright, he’s fine, he’s not hurt, everything’s _fine_ —

“So,” Stark says, and MJ looks over to find him staring at her, suspicious. “You’re Michelle Jones.”

“So,” MJ says, crossing her arms and doing her best to give him the same look in return. “You’re Tony Stark.”

“Why are you saying that like it’s a surprise?” he grumbles, like he finds the mere idea of someone not knowing who he is deeply upsetting.

MJ shrugs. “No reason.”

She’s working very hard at playing it cool, mostly because Parker said no, it’s MJ, and that means she’s got at least a little bit of a reputation to live up to.

Also, she may not be his number one fan, but it’s still Tony Stark.

He’s been superhero-ing almost as long as she’s been alive.

_Also_ , she’s trying real hard to keep a straight face, because they’re the same height, but also he’s wearing some genuine lifts in that suit, if the height of the shoes is any indication.

Stark looks over his shoulder, back to where Parker is pacing back and forth, hands waving around as he tries to talk to his aunt.

“Is he really alright?” he asks, and MJ looks at him.

_I begged him to let me come._

If Stark hadn’t gotten to him first, Parker would still be running around wearing his crappy little sweatpants-and-goggles suit.

But that doesn’t mean he should ever have been dragged into this kind of fight.

“Of course not,” she says.

Stark nods, like that’s more or less what he’d expected.

“Of course not,” he echoes, and there’s something about his voice that sounds just a little too similar to Parker’s, and MJ remembers, again, just how long he’s been playing Atlas for the entire world, it seems.

Stark is silent for a long moment, staring out over the city the same way Parker likes to do so much.

Then his gaze sharpens into focus, and MJ thinks he’s spotted something Important, or maybe he’s just come to some Very Crucial insight.

Instead, he points one gauntleted finger, says, “What are those?”, and MJ turns to see him pointing at the half-eaten plate of cookies.

“They’re cookies,” she says, because she knew he was rich, but she didn’t think he was _that_ rich.

Stark looks between her and the plate with a highly doubtful expression.

Then he clanks past her, takes a cookie, which must be stone cold by now, takes a bite, and chews it thoughtfully.

MJ waits for his verdict.

“Why do they taste like that?”

She shrugs. “Chemicals.”

“Huh.”

He inspects it closely, and MJ has to remind herself that this guy is a genius, too, as much as anyone at school or anywhere else, except possibly Wakanda.

“Mrs. Ortega in the apartment below made them,” she says, when he seems to be done with his scientific evaluation. “You should send her a fruit basket or something.”

“She made these,” Stark echoes, and then she sees the moment he understands. “For the kid? I’ll send her a whole fruit orchard.”

MJ makes a show of looking over the crowded neighborhood. “I think she’d prefer the fruit basket.”

Stark follows her gaze and sighs.

“Yeah,” he says. “You’re probably right.”

“Of course I’m right,” MJ says. “I’m always right.”

“Sorry,” Stark says. “Yeah, no, that’s my line.”

“At any rate,” she says. “I really don’t think she’d want an orchard.”

He hums a little bit, like that’s a fair point, and makes his own show of looking out over the city again.

“And what about you?” he asks, after a moment.

MJ blinks. “What about me?”

Stark turns to look at her. “What do you want, Michelle Jones?”

What does she want?

“World peace,” she says, because she’s not ready to get into it with Tony Stark. “Equal pay. Abolishment of the electoral college.”

He scoffs. “I’m not _that_ rich.”

“But I’d settle for Spider-Man getting some help,” MJ says, suddenly as certain as she’s been all afternoon. “Getting back to his old self.”

Stark looks like he’s about to interject there, so she backtracks, amends her statement.

“Or as near as can be expected,” she says. “Under the circumstances.”

“Under the circumstances?” Stark asks, all false innocence, so she knows that he knows exactly what she means. “What circumstances are we talking about?”

“Something about an alien invasion,” she says. “Half the universe. Something like that. Ringing a bell?”

He thinks about denying it.

She can see it, plain as day, on his face.

He’s really considering denying it, and MJ thinks about what Parker had said, how he didn’t know if anyone else remembered, how certain he was that no one else knew—

“Yeah,” Stark says at last. “Ringing a ton of bells.”

He remembers.

Or at least, he knows what happened—perhaps because he and Parker and the mysterious other people were at the center of the explosion, so to speak, at the epicenter, and everything else revolved around this thing that they’ve done.

“Look, cards on the table,” MJ says, and drops the unaffected act, just for a second. “You’ve been through some stuff. All of the Avengers have. I know you have people to help with—with this kind of thing.”

“Right,” Stark says.

He doesn’t say anything else, but he looks over his shoulder, where Parker’s stopped pacing, is standing with his back to the two of them, talking too quietly to be heard.

“He’s a good guy,” MJ says, and her own voice is quieter now, too. “If anyone deserves it, he does.”

Which is kind of a joke, because she can’t think of a single person who wouldn’t deserve the help, in this kind of situation.

But this is Peter Parker.

Someone has to help him.

She blinks, and Stark is staring at her, face grim and serious.

_Oh, right_ , she thinks. _Genius_.

“So,” he says. “You know.”

She could deny it.

For a few seconds, she toys with the idea of utter and complete denial, but they are, all three of them, pretty smart, and she doesn’t feel like wasting the energy.

“Yeah,” she says. “I know.”

“Does he—”

“Does he know that I know?” MJ asks, and then makes a face at how childish it sounds. “No.”

That’s all she says, but Stark seems to be hearing something else, something she’s not saying, because he peers at her closely.

Then he groans.

“Oh, God,” he says. “I do _not_ miss high school. This is such a pain.”

MJ opens her mouth to—what, protest? Defend herself?—she’s not sure what, exactly, she’s planning to do, but then Parker’s suddenly there, and she gives Stark her best _don’t you dare tell him_ glare.

“Mr. Stark?” Parker says, looking between the two of them carefully. “I’m—I’m ready to go.”

Go where?

Back to the facility, perhaps. Maybe back to his apartment.

Somewhere where someone’s waiting.

Somewhere where someone can help.

As long as it checks those boxes, MJ doesn’t care.

Anywhere else will be just fine.

Stark looks at Parker, and then back at her, and MJ’s back to desperately wondering how she can threaten the richest man in the world with severe bodily harm when said richest man also picks fights with aliens for fun.

Miraculously, Stark shuts his mouth.

Parker looks like he can tell something happened, but he can’t quite figure out what.

“You cool to follow me?” Stark asks him, instead of explaining what’s going on, so at least his instincts are good. “Happy’s got a car, but it’s a bit aways.”

“I’m fine,” Parker says, absent. “MJ, are you—”

She waves her hand. “I can get down on my own.”

“Are you sure?” he presses. “We could—I could drop you off somewhere—”

Stark is watching them, deeply unimpressed.

MJ’s not looking at him.

“I promise,” she says. “I can climb down a ladder without cracking my head open.”

His face falters, just a little, and she cringes at her own inability to let the subject matter drop.

“Right,” she says, and risks glancing back over at Stark, just to be like _see? It’s an issue_. “Given the circumstances.”

Parker hesitates. “What?”

God, she can so picture the look on his face.

She wonders what Iron Man would have said, if he’d shown up and found Peter just standing there, sans mask and normal as anything.

The mental image, makes her smile, and she waves her hand again, thinks about how she needs to take the plate back down to Mrs. Ortega, in the room on the other side of the roof.

“I’ll be fine,” she says, and means it. “Go on.”

Parker looks at her for a second longer, until she almost looks away, but she doesn’t, and it’s very hard, to just stand there and be looked at.

Stark clears his throat, and Parker jumps.

“Right,” he says. “Right, okay.”

The visor slides shut on the Iron Man suit, and MJ wonders briefly about ventilation, and then the repulsor cannons fire up, and Stark is hovering a few feet above the ground, waiting.

MJ steps back, so that the two of them have a clear line to wherever it is that they need to go.

Parker looks back at her, one more time, and she nods in the general direction of Avengers Tower, she thinks.

“Alright,” she says. “See you around, Spider-Man.”

Parker hesitates, still, just a second longer.

“You promise?”

He says it kind of like a joke, but MJ thinks about the way he looped his fingers through hers, about the way it had felt, like two kids on a playground.

“Sure,” she says. “I promise.”

Stark mumbles something she can’t hear, and then he’s gone, and then Parker is, too, and MJ walks to the edge of the roof, watches them disappear between the buildings, where the sun burns red.

She waits a few moments longer, and then she picks up the plate, climbs carefully down the ladder, and edges her way back along the fire escape and into the apartment below.

**Author's Note:**

> Just one more, I think.
> 
> The next one won't be so melodramatic, I promise.


End file.
